#half-formed thoughts

[beneaththegildedmoon]

Watching Louis Theroux's new documentary and I was expecting to be cringing and laughing at these guys (and tbf, I am a bit) but God it's actually just really fucking sad how these dudes live, especially the couple of the fans of these influencers he spoke to (the guy who said he doesnt believe in depression and that his brother killed himself but it's important to "see the positive in it" and that working out etc. would fix it was genuinely tragic). The paranoia and defensiveness and hollow posturing are depressing to watch. I wish he had followed up more with the women who are in these guys' lives, though I suspect they wouldn't have been "allowed" to talk to him more than the few snippets he managed to get with them tbh. I also wish we heard more from people who left the manosphere, etc. to provide more of a counternarrative. I worry a little bit that by showing these guys and letting them frame the narrative themselves so much, while making them look pathetic and sad to outsiders, may just boost their profile to their fanbases. Like all the interstitials of them posing next to fancy cars and flashing their watches and shit looks stupid as hell to me, and I feel like the intent is to showcase how shallow and manufactured that image is, but to the people who want that stuff and think it's cool surely it's just advertising?

[azuma-kun]

Discussion Question: Will There Ever Be an End to Border?

The whole point of Border is the protection of Mikado City from those coming to steal trion. That’s a need that doesn’t and cannot have an end. Given the way the planet states are set up, the wars and occupations are more or less inevitable.

(unless something changes of course)

As such, Meeden needs to invent a way to keep those wars far from her shores. But, no character has shown an inclination towards that line of thinking. It hasn’t even been brought up narratively.

Border is only four years old and as things are it’s doomed to a never-ending war. Admin is even preparing for that through the away test and the distribution + invention of roles.

So that’s time and money and effort and skill and goodwill and trust being poured into a neverending. Shuttering Border would mean rendering all this investment and it’s very existence (and provision of income) obsolete.

(This is just a roundabout way of asking if Border should make the end of its existence a goal or keep risking the chance of large scale invasions and possible occupation forever. I don’t think this is the story Ashihara is telling though so I’m not asking for it to be told. I'm just thinking about implications of a Border that is trying to end the wars even if only for Meeden)

[quasi-normalcy]

Think we were too hasty in throwing out modernity, honestly. 30+ years since the end of the Cold War and post-modernism hasn't proven a reliable basis for anything; meanwhile, traditionalism sucks absolute ass. We need to dust off modernism.

[oxeanic]

You do actually have to love the world. Not necessarily as it is, of course - the view that what exists or what's natural is what's good has done quite a lot of harm already - but you do have to believe that the world can be an actually good place to be, not merely not a bad place.

[yusuke-of-valla]

Semi-related to that last ask but it is a Thing with me when I watch shows of the "get up, go to school, save the world" variety where at least one adult knows about the world saving and they're like "oh no what will I do for college I can't put world saving on my application" because I'm always like "you absolutey can, actually." Stretch the truth and have one of the trusted adults write your letter of recommendation.

I'm not gonna say it's WRONG when this trope pops up because I think there's been a lot of change in the idea of what makes a well-rounded student (like the idea that the kid who has to go home and watch their siblings every day because their parents are both working has less to put on their resume than the kid who does crew and debate club but they can still be well-rounded you know) so some of it might just be cultural + My dad works in a university so knows a lot about the other side of this so I know about it

But like, look if rich kids can bulk up their applications by paying thousands of dollars to go to some fancy as summer thing at Yale or Princeton, or to go do community service abroad, or in some cases just straight up lie to get sailing put on the application

YOU can launder your world-saving as community service and write an essay about how it taught you about responsibility, duty, community, commitment, etc.

[fakecrfan]

Hmmmm I’m re-reading some transcripts and--

I am not convinced that Jon needs to take live statements to stay alive. Or maybe even read statements.

Life if we accept the premise that the Jon needing the Beholding to keep him alive because it had saved him from death, the same should be true of other avatars whose lifespans were extended past the point of death. And then if that were true, those avatars would die when the powers were removed from the TMA world.

But!

They didn’t.

Simon Fairchild was hundreds of years old. He was, presumably, kept alive and together by the Vast as much as if not more than Jon was. But when the the Entities were removed--he survived. It seems like he wasn’t even going to die quickly from natural causes, he had to get actively murdered by a mob.

Perhaps the addiction metaphor is also a “makes you think you need it more than you do” thing.

[skullinacowboyhat]

not me writing an entire script for a new visual novel I will likely not have time to finish.

[collapsedsquid]

If you take the Branko Milanovic thesis that 20th century “communism“ was really just a way to achieve freedom from empire and modern bourgeoisie capitalism, then you can see that era of communism, particularly the lenin-derived varieties, as ultimate an elaborate form of self-delusion similar to nationalism, except substituting the “working class“ for the nation. The “working class” as constituted by these revolutionaries doesn’t have language, blood, soil, any  of the ideas that were used to bind nations together and insists it is in fact internationalist but it does have what I regard as one of the crucial attributes of nations, and that is the ability to hold grudges and be owed things, a metaphorical ledger.  This, you can say is the crucial link between bourgeoisie thought, the nation-state, and the leninist-communist working class.